Hi Chandan da,
I did go through your last post, and the cost of intruding, I would like to put forward my views.
1: It might be my ignorance, but it appears to me that a substantial impediment in arriving at an UNIVERSAL SYSTEM of transliteration applicable to both for computer key-board typing and for ordinary writing of Oxomiya in Roman letters is the incompability of being true to Oxomiya sounds while attempting to keep in step with a Indian sub-continent languages standard.
When I started out on the project I had nothing to refer to....I had to start from the scratch. Thats why i decided to use the devanagari system as my model and build on it. It was not due to a will to conform to the normal sub-continent standards....instead it was due to necessity.. But if you did go through the second list i posted, you will see thati differ from the devnagari system in almost half the sounds.
And I do believe a working system, if not a Universal System, can be formulated for the Assamese language. Let's go back and compare it with the transliteration schemes of other languages. The only other transliteration scheme I know anything about is ancient egyptian. The problems while transliterating Egyptian are collossal. Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Hieratic script has no vowel sounds...only consonant sonds. A large number of the consonant sounds are now obsolete (Some of them are classified under Disordered speech by IPA ). Of the few sounds that are spoken, most are of Arabic origin...like "h.a","qaf","d.ad", "mnd_" which are totally foreign to English language. But even then they have an enviable transliteration system going on there. Their transliteration scheme consists of two parts. For the casual speaker they introduced the vowels"a" and "e" in appropiate places to make the language more fluid. And when you go through a transliterated version of the text, it has very little relation to the original pronunciation....but it works as a good practical modle. For people who want to say the words int he correct form they express the same in International phonetic symbols....
What we learn from them is that we need two systems to completely transliterate one language into another.. Actually it is the situation in most of the cases when we have to transcribe a phonetic language (like assamese) into an orthographic language (like english) and vice versa. It is beacuse in orthographic languages the pronunciation of words change with the change in order. If we tried to transcribe assamese into a phonetic language, say hindi, telegu etc, the problems would be way less complicated and we could do with one system because the pronunciations . But when we transliterate into english we get grotesque results. e.g., "moor" (mine) when spoken in english "moor"(an expanse infertile land)
-------------------------------- Chan Mahanta wrote:
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